


Raumel

by Mindi_Bones



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood, Dark, Original Fiction, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 16:44:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3536702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mindi_Bones/pseuds/Mindi_Bones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Today, Raumel is a woman seeking destruction.  The nephs have come too close, and she ends them.  </p><p> </p><p>  <i>More when I figure it all out</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Raumel

**Author's Note:**

> _Nephs_ \- the enemy. It is slang for the things that are trying to stop her. They do not all have wings, or human form. A derivative of nephilim.
> 
>  _Healing song_ \- Raumel's kind derive their healing and power from a trance-like state induced by music. More about that later.

++++

 

The blood had begun to dry, and she pushed a dark clump of matted and sticky hair away from her face and looked into the mirror.  She wasn't as gone as her reflection made her look, but the spider web of broken glass had left her with a jagged smile.  A quiet groan drifted through the air behind her, and she let her gaze fall to the cracked tile of the floor in her reflection.

Her eyes once again on herself in the mirror, the smile thinned and bent as she pulled a triangle shard of glass from the soft flesh near her collar bone.  She watched as a trickle of red ran down from the tiny tear in her pale skin, then she licked her thumb and rubbed it hard into the wound and watched it then slowly heal.

There were more breathy sounds behind her and her brow furrowed as she turned.  She would have to do something about all the noise.

+

Raumel was her name, and she thought she heard the dying thing say it as she knelt beside him.

"Shh, love," she whispered, ghosting a stained finger across his brow, down his cheek.   What was left of a broken black wing jutted at a wrong angle from beneath the human form.  The few remaining feathers at the tip twitched and curled at her caress.   "You're going to be alright, _neph_ ," she whispered.

The neph were ugly and violent creatures, but Raumel thought that they were beautiful in their death.  The amber orbs looked up at her, pleading perhaps, the arrogance of vengeance now gone.  The neph didn't really live, didn't really have life, but she had taken many now, and like an ebb tide leeching through sand back to the sea, something drained from the golden eyes as the borrowed heart of their form stopped beating.

The man closed his eyes, and Raumel huffed with impatience, moving her hand to the ancient dagger that hung precariously from its place in his neck.   The protruding hilt swayed minutely with the neph's pulse and the rise and fall of his breath.   "No, no.  Look at me.  Look at me," she urged quietly, gently.

It wasn't uncommon for a dying thing to fight at its last breath, and Raumel barely flinched when the neph's eyes flew open and his arm raised to clench tight at the leather and buckles across her chest.  Their eyes met once more, the winged man's wide with fear.  "Shh, love," she said again, slowly pulling the dagger from his throat.  The blood came then, slow as a sunrise, leaking a puddle onto the floor.  Raumel watched as amber turned mustard, then arylide, then grey.   He was still.

She stood and turned, gazing one more time into the broken glass.  There was silence now from all parts of the empty and ruined school, and it was time to move on.  She needed _healing song_ and rest, and could get neither here.  She wound her way through long abandoned rooms and hallways, leaving red streaks on shiny walls, stepping over corpses along the way.  Finally she found her way outside and crumbled to her knees on the muddy ground. She leaned her head back and let the fat droplets of rain pelt her eyelids, her lips, sluicing through her hair and down her neck, dried blood thinning and chased away.  Raumel didn't ache for the dead, but she ached nonetheless.  In these moments after blood and graying eyes, something too warm, too grounded, always tried to come in.  It tugged at the edges of her resolve, darting and scurrying, the way rats snatch morsels and disappear into shadowed corners.  Nothing would quiet her rage, not even glimpses of doubt and conscience brought on by the vulgarity of meaningless death.   But the nephs did more to stop her at end of their lives than they ever did while they were living them.

At last her chin fell to her chest, the fleeting touch of remorse now gone.  She took one last deep breath, and a moment later she was a raven, flying up and up, into the gray and raining sky.

 

++++


End file.
